Constructing English: pre-service ELA teachers navigating an unwieldy discipline

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe a pedagogical innovation – a matrix construction exercise – intended to help pre-service teachers (PTs) navigate the multiple and oftentimes competing discourses that shape the school subject English Language Arts (ELA). Design/methodology/approach To explore the various ways the PTs drew on the discursively constructed paradigms of ELA throughout their teacher preparation program, researchers (themselves teacher educators) conducted an intertextual analysis (Prior, 1995) of PTs’ classroom texts and interview transcripts. Findings The intertextual analysis suggested that PTs possessed knowledge of and investment in a range of discourses, which they used to anchor their own pedagogical and curricular decision-making and to anticipate the leanings and ideologies of other stakeholders in ELA. Although the organizational schema of the matrix proved helpful from an orientation standpoint, it also may have disguised the productive tensions between particular discourses for some PTs. Originality/value Although scholars have long noted the plurality of the school subject English and some studies on innovations in teacher education allude to the difficulties that teachers encounter as they navigate the multiple purposes of ELA, there is little scholarship that considers how pre-service and beginning teachers might best navigate that incoherence and unwieldiness. This study, which contextualizes and explores a pedagogical innovation in an English methods class designed to help PTs navigate the many “Englishes”, attempts to fill this gap. The findings suggest that teacher preparation in ELA would do well to conceive of pedagogical innovations in teacher education that allow teachers to grapple with, rather than solve, the uncertainty and unfinalizability of the discipline.